Pieces at the annual International Contemporary Furniture Fair are good-looking – and well-seated in ideas.
By Eils Lotozo
Inquirer Staff Writer
NEW YORK – Looks generally rule in the home-furnishings industry. It’s all about the turn of that chair leg, the fabric on the sofa, the color of a lamp.
At the International Contemporary Furniture Fair, looks matter too. But the real focus here is on ideas – about materials and technologies, about what furniture should do, and even about how we should live.
The annual showcase of the best in modern design, which ended Tuesday, brought more than 500 exhibitors from around the world to the Jacob Javits Center, where they displayed new offerings that will start making their way to stores in the coming months.
Some companies, such as Herman Miller, focused on the high-tech realm. The glow of its Leaf light, an Yves Behar-designed LED desk lamp, dims and changes tone with the stroke of a fingertip, thanks to a touch pad in the base ($525, www.hermanmiller.com).
Other companies explored new uses for old materials and new looks for traditional media. Oso Industries, for example, showed tables, consoles and desks clad in tinted, polished concrete ($1,400-$1,850, www.osoindustries.com). Trove debuted kinetic-patterned wallpaper created from blown-up and computer-manipulated photographs of flowers ($125 for a 25-inch-by-38-inch sheet, www.troveline.com).
Some trends that emerged at previous fairs, such as contemporary kids’ furnishings, continued to make a strong showing.
Rugs, especially, were bigger than ever, with new offerings from more than two dozen companies. Among them: Amy Helfand, whose vivid-hued creations incorporate elements from hiking maps and flora and fauna of the Appalachian Trail (prices start at $100 a square foot, www.amyhelfand.com); and Rugged Art, which showed limited-edition art rugs ($80 per square foot, www.ruggedart.com) whose funky patterns come out of the work of a group of New York and London artists.
Philadelphia textile-design firm Galbraith & Paul also introduced a zingy new rug line, based on the patterns it uses in its hand-blocked fabrics (prices start at $2,000, www.galbraithandpaul.com).
Intriguing lighting designs were all over the show, too, including Dform’s laser-cut wood-veneer lamps and pendants, whose pieces interlock to create intricate puzzlelike patterns (prices start at $270, www.dformdesign.com), and Woggon’s recycled-wire pendants, which have an edgy post-industrial/Japanese look (prices start at $200, www.woggon.net).
We loved a lamp from a British company called Formfollows (info@formfollows.co.uk), which, like many fledgling firms that use the fair as a launch pad, displayed a prototype whose retail price hadn’t yet been determined.
“Maybe $1,400,” the young woman in the booth guessed about Moonlight, a large round stainless-steel reflector on a stand with an uplight. Different colored magnetic disks can be adhered to the reflector to change the quality of the light. Totally magical was the disk featuring a photo of the moon.
At least a dozen ultramodern European kitchen outfitters showed austere designs featuring high-gloss cabinetry destined to expose every greasy fingerprint, and sinks barely big enough to rinse a coffee mug. But one of the biggest categories at the fair was multifunctional furniture.
An exhibit sponsored by the Industrial Designers Society of America showed some younger members’ creativity in a coffee table that can flip up to become an upholstered love seat (www.akemitanaka.com) and a clever steel-and-plywood restaurant chair with a curved shelf at the lower back, designed to stow a woman’s purse (www.mesvevardar.com).
And there was Meritalia’s latest offering from storied designer Gaetano Pesce, who was feted last year with an award and an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It’s a modular couch system consisting of velvet upholstered blocks and rectangles, in an array of jewel tones, that clip together to form different seating configurations (prices start at $789, www.meritalia.it).
We were also taken with the ingenious family dining table introduced by Ducduc, which launched its line of high-end modern kids’ and baby furniture at last year’s fair.
Panels on top of the table flip from dry eraseboard on one side to walnut on the other, and slide out to reveal storage beneath, for sweeping away those toys and crayons when it’s dinnertime. Long storage benches with specially designed, detachable booster seats are also available ($8,500 for the six-seat table, www.ducducnyc.com).
For kookiest multitasking, though, our vote goes to the Dutch Tub, a wood-fired hot tub made of lightweight polyester and available in several candy colors ($6,000, www.dutchtub.com). Start your fire in the tub’s stainless-steel heating system, and you can cook your dinner over it in the special wok that comes with the thing.
Among all the ideas bubbling up at this year’s fair, though, sustainable design lofted highest.
The New York Institute of Technology showed student-designed furniture for a solar home. Parsons teamed with a Swedish design school to exhibit plans and models for environmentally conscious prefab dwellings. And all over the show, firms big and small touted their products’ use of minimal packaging, low volatile-organic-compound finishes, and sustainably harvested wood.
Textile and wallpaper manufacturer Design Tex promoted a new line of bamboo fabrics from English designer Jocelyn Warner. The company 3-Form introduced a product called 100 Percent, made entirely from recycled plastic bottles and aimed at architectural applications.
Two Philadelphia companies were part of the sustainable-design contingent. Mio, whose products can be found at national retailers such as Target, showed a new spun-aluminum pendant lamp, a modular cork table decoration kit, and a new design for its 3-D wall panels, made from recycled paper (www.mioculture.com).
Iannone:Sanderson introduced the handsome Go Green line of tables and cabinets, all made in Kensington, featuring bamboo plywood, hardwoods from managed forests, and kirei board made from the stalks of the sorghum plant ($750-$1,200, www.i-sdesign.com). Particularly eye-catching was its Mod coffee table, which combines the kirei with white or orange laminate.
SMC Furnishings displayed some of its 30-piece collection of furniture made from reclaimed wood (prices start at $400, www.spacemfrs.com).
For SMC, there has been an unexpected downside to the growing embrace of sustainability and consumer interest in designs that reuse old goods. According to SMC’s Brandon Phillips, reclaimed wood has become so sought-after that reclamation companies are sending prices through the roof.
“Ten years ago,” he said, “you could pull this wood out of a Dumpster.”
